Wikipedia's on drugs again, complains Russia

The 16th century writer rather than the sprinter?

How do you say "The irony is killing me" in Russian?

Well, I assume it's the irony, and not the polonium.

That part of Russia is clearly run by fucking idiots. Good information is the key to solving drug problems...attempting to wish it away doesn't work as has been demonstrated ad nauseum. Firstly, switching from vodka to weed would almost certainly benefit their society. Secondly when people try cannabis and find out that their knees don't explode (or whatever deleterous effects are being claimed at the time) then that torpedos the establishment's credibility on everything they have been saying about all drugs which can be dangerous, because it leads people to underestimate the threat of the truly nasty ones.

Take Krokodil, for instance...you want photos of users (and the horrible effects) in circulation because people will stay the fuck away from it once they have seen what the stuff does.

Comrade Putin stuck in the Cold War.

Good luck trying to control INFORMATION, Comrade Putin! The only way you will be able to do so, effectively, is to cut off your entire country from the internet! But, you are too stupid to know this, aren't you?

Politicians and bureaucrats, the species that never learn

Clued-up techies with a net connection on every part of the globe have long since found and shared ways to get at whatever content they want. Censorship didn't work in the days of Fanny Hill; it didn't work in the days of Tijuana Bibles; it hasn't put a dent in any major pornographic or political material (insofar as there's a difference¹), since fleet-footed boys handed out libels in the London of my youth in the 1670s; and it certainly doesn't work today.

I'd be interested how long it takes someone with a Tor connection to get a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook: my guess is less than 60 seconds, allowing maybe three times that for parts of the world where you also need to be a bit tricksier, VPN etc. If one of the most genuinely abhorrent activities, child porn, cannot be thoroughly policed, what chance for chemical recipes, really?

I admit there is a kind of weary amusement watching po-faced officialdom go through the same motions with different technologies over the centuries, misunderstanding, failing, blundering, failing again, ever driven by all the retarded intellectual metabolism that only government can guarantee ... but after the first 20,000 doomed attempts to stop adults reading what they want to read, listening to the music they like, putting into their own bodies whatever they please, you do find yourself wondering, Won't They Ever Learn?

¹ Lots of pretension and superficiality, but porn is slightly more honest.